When the soft drinks levy was announced in 2016, industry claimed it would be more effective as a stealth tax than a public health policy. Coca-Cola’s then general manager in the UK, Leendert den Hollander, warned that “the facts don’t suggest that a sugar tax works to change behaviour”.
He may have been right about consumers but he was wrong about the behaviour of his own company. By the time the tax was introduced two years later, most drinks sold by Coca-Cola — except chancellor Rishi Sunak’s beloved classic coke — had been reformulated to duck under the tax threshold, set at 5g of sugar per 100ml. As a result, industry sales and profits were maintained but sugar consumption in all soft drinks fell 30 per cent.
This is a lesson in how to tackle obesity. It is possible for companies to reformulate many products without people even noticing. While most consumers may have ignored the tax increase, industry assumed that enough would be tempted by cheaper products, so altered their recipes.